this is the steeple," when she says:
A bamboo road,
With a floor-mat siding,
Children are quarrelling,
And parents chiding,
the "children" being represented by the fingers and the "parents" by the thumbs. She is in China. I have more than 600 rhymes from her Chinese collection. Let me tell you how I got them.
One hot day during my summer vacation, while sitting on the veranda of a house among the hills, fifteen miles west of Peking, my friend, Mrs. C. H. Fenn, said to me:
"Have you noticed those rhymes, Mr. Headland?"
"What rhymes?" I inquired.
"The rhymes Mrs. Yin is repeating to Henry."
" No, I have not noticed them. Ask her
to repeat that one again."
Mrs. Fenn did so, and the old nurse repeated the following rhyme, very much in the tone of, "The goblins'll git you if you don't look out."
He climbed up the candlestick,
The little mousey brown,
To steal and eat tallow,
And he couldn't get down.
He called for his grandma,
But his grandma was in town,
So he doubled up into a wheel,
And rolled himself down.
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